The Black Key
by soylent green was taken
Summary: "Thus began Zoisite's late period, a flourishing that occurs among gifted musicians in the final few months before they die." A story about the kurozuishou and pianos, mostly. Original (Classic) anime canon, with obvious borrowings from elsewhere.


**The Black Key**  
>by Soylent Green<p>

Even though it resided in the world of the living, Rag Time was a dead place, so it belonged to the Dark Kingdom.

It used to be a jazz bar. It had belonged to a man who loved cats and baseball and novels. One afternoon the man had gone to a ball game and drunk too much beer and, in an upswell of boozy sundazzled optimism, decided he would give up the bar and write novels about cats instead.

And so he sold Rag Time and became a famous cat novelist, and the bar fell to low company. It lost money and shut down. Its doors were chained up; hooligans smashed its windows. Someone tried to set it on fire. But no one broke in, so no one was there to witness the black smudge appear on the mirror behind the pool table, as though the mirror were being burnt from behind. The smudge grew and grew until it blacked out the mirror entirely, until it wasn't a mirror anymore but a hole, and through the hole crawled a beautiful torchheaded thing with polished green gemstones for eyes.

Zoisite went straight for the piano. He had an affinity for the instrument and wanted one for himself. That was what had drawn him to this place. His plan was to steal the piano and install it at his window overlooking the bone garden, where he could play it when he was thinking out a problem, or on nights when he couldn't sleep, or when a sad arctic coldness came paring down from the crack in Kingdom's sky and Kunzite was somewhere on the other side of it, running through the noonday dark in the skin of a white bear.

But in the end Zoisite decided it was easier to leave the piano where it was and go to Rag Time instead. He liked his dead jazz bar. He didn't understand the concepts of jazz or bars exactly, but he understood the spirit behind them, the loneliness and the intoxication and the sex. He understood their animating principle, which was pain.

Pain was the principle behind music as well, or at least the piano. The piano had been the voice of pain ever since it had lost its _forte_ and become a soft and inward thing. Zoisite had tried to explain this once to Kunzite because he thought it might be useful, but music disturbed Kunzite and the conversation had gone over badly. Perhaps it wasn't information that could be shared. Pain was a solitary study, after all.

So Zoisite came to Rag Time alone, again and again, crawling through the mirror across the pool table toward the wounded baby grand. He liked to come in the hours before dawn, when the street outside was silent and the night shut tight as a fist. He had no repertoire and couldn't read music, so he worked instead on improvisations, which he called nocturnes, though they didn't sound like any nocturnes you or I have heard. They had words, which came out of the piano by accident whenever Zoisite hit a wolfnote.

_Finite is our sadness upon this earth she-bop_  
><em>Smoke is the voice, uh-huh, hammer the moment<em>  
><em>She-lah, one magic sleep ends beginning another<em>

The more Zoisite came to play, the more Rag Time shed the false darkness of the city night to acquire an antiradiance befitting a true province of hell. A mantle of shadow settled heavily on its shoulders. Though its outward decrepitude grew no worse, the place became frightening to look at, even in daytime, and city folk rushed past with their eyes turned away.

One night Zoisite held a pretty girl captive in the bar, tied up as bait for his crooked brother Nephrite. That had been a colossal night for pain. After it was over, Zoisite placed the black crystal -– Nephrite's secret second heart - on top of the piano like a metronome, and composed his greatest nocturne to date. He played it only on the black keys, in zero-zero time. Its song was the song of the crystal itself, which Zoisite realized was also a black key- _the_ black key, the duende, the pain-lode, the note that resonated with all the damaged places in the world where music leaked in.

Thus began Zoisite's late period, a flourishing that occurs among gifted musicians in the final few months before they die. He learned to tune the frequency of the black key to the wounds that special people carried inside them, from which he could extract a single note of pain so powerful and pure it had its own colour. These he refracted and collected as gemstones, one crystallized note per person. There were seven stones in all, which puzzled Zoisite because, ignorant though he was of musical notation, he intuited that he needed one more note to complete the octave.

It was Kunzite, in fact, who found the eighth.

Though he disliked music and concerned himself only with the business end of Zoisite's work –- the gemstones and the monsters and the nights of knives and firebombs -– Kunzite couldn't help but notice how Zoisite's passion for the piano was influencing his homelife. The boy had always been a pain devil, which suited Kunzite fine, but now there was a truly imaginative quality to his play. He seemed suddenly curious about the red edges of experience, and Kunzite was happy to take him there, for these were the places where Kunzite felt most at home.

And so when Zoisite asked to be bound by his wrists in the same way his youma had tied Nephrite's girl, Kunzite had obliged without hesitation, roping the boy's ankles for good measure. When Zoisite asked to make love to him in his malign aspect, Kunzite had taken the shape of a grey horse with eyes like white lanterns, even though Zoisite had been thinking of the bear. And when Zoisite lost three of his coloured gemstones to the enemy, he asked to be punished the way students of music are punished when they botch a recital— by mortifying themselves at the lap of their instrument. So Kunzite had bent Zoisite over the wall of the bone garden and ripped down his trousers and pushed the black crystal up into him like a key into a lock, saying he'd better walk carefully now; the crystal wasn't large but both its ends were pointed. Then he fucked the boy, because the shock and delight on the lovely flushed face had been irresistible, and somewhere midway to his climax, Zoisite's happy gasps and hiccups turned into _stop stop stop_ because the black crystal, which was still in there, had gone too far wrong way and pierced him on the inside. Thus they found the eighth note of pain, profoundest and most perfect of them all.

Zoisite made his final trip to Rag Time four days before his life ended. He didn't know he was doing to die, of course, but he felt unusual nonetheless, as though he were on the cusp of some deep and possibly final form of change. All of the pain-stones had been mapped and extracted; what remained merely was to recover the ones that had been stolen.

_Finite is our sadness upon this earth she-bop_

They'd been experimenting with the black crystal again, several nights earlier. This time Kunzite had pressed its sharpened point to the tender stretch of skin just behind Zoisite's genitals, a soft spot which, to their surprise, yielded abruptly as though it were hollow inside. The point sunk below the skin and opened a hidden door, into which disappeared the crystal and most of Kunzite's forefinger. Kunzite got his finger back, black-red with blood, but the crystal was swallowed forever. Zoisite felt it move up into him, harmless in its new containment, its sad flat note resonating with the frequencies of Zoisite's deepest, most secret self. He'd wept then, as he'd never done, and Kunzite touched him all over in awe and disbelief.

_Smoke is the voice, uh-huh, hammer the moment_

Zoisite's fingers felt unfamiliar on the keyboard. Already his body was changing: feet and hands growing smaller: a swelling under his nipples, which ached when Kunzite pressed them. But there was no talk of _when_. Devils that they were, they'd bent the change to their advantage. They were already planning the ways that Zoisite's vulnerable new body, which had been unlocked and now opened in two ways, could be used to lure and trap their enemies, much in the way that Osaka Naru had been used to trap Nephrite.

_One magic sleep ends beginning another_

Zoisite looked over at the corner beside the bar, where months before his youma had tied the girl to an overturned table. Kunzite would tie him like that, or perhaps in some other way. The rope would burn his thin soft wrists and the buried thing inside him would resonate with sympathetic pain. He'd hang from the rope just as the girl did, for love, and compose in his head his final masterpiece, a tune of ends and new beginnings, played only on the black keys.

**NOTE:**

Zoisite plagiarized the words for his nocturne from "Changing Your Bulb" by Dean Young, in Bender: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).


End file.
